The rising number of venues of software utilization leads to rising potential for a higher number of errors and faults to be introduced into modern systems. The potential for introduction of errors and faults into a modern system makes practice of debugging, or finding and removing errors crucial to system integrity. A system originates from more than source code, and may include metadata, resource files, or other kind of information. Debugging efforts to maintain system integrity are in turn defined by the complexity of the system.
Debugging complexity varies based on the effort in correcting simple errors. The effort may be in performing lengthy data collection and analysis to do exhaustive path analysis to attempt thorough exploration of programming execution paths. The debugging skill of the programmer or the quality assurance team may also be a major factor in efficient and thorough debugging of an application. However, system complexity has the higher impact in demanding greater quantity of software debugging effort. Other factors that affect software debugging efforts are programming language(s) used in coding the software, and utilization of available tools such as debuggers. Debuggers enhance debugging efforts by allowing the programmer to start, stop, and pause the execution of a program. Debuggers also enable the programmer to monitor an application's execution and to insert breakpoints (stops) throughout the execution path for analysis.